This is a followup post to ‘Demo: configuring and accessing #Office365 on an iPad’. In that past we’ve shown how to configure accessing your Office 365 mailbox on an iPad.

The number one followup question on that post was…”but what about SharePoint or Office Web Apps’??

So, I decided to write this followup about exactly that…accessing SharePoint and Office Web Apps on an iPad

The first step ofcourse is opening Safari and typing in the URL of your SP site. This initially redirects you to the authentication portal (login.microsoftonline.com) where you enter your username/password. If your domain is federated these are your AD credentials:

SharePoint
After signing in the SP startpage opens:

As you can see this looks pretty good. I didn’t do much to the design/layout of the default site. Not because this is a limitation of SPO, but more because of my design skills and lack of time .

I found navigating around the sites works very smoothly, see some screens below:

The default Calendar view:

And a default Document Library:

Also, editing a site through the 2010 Ribbon works:

During my browsing through the sites I noticed it went really smoothly, I never thought SP was userfriendly on an iPad out of the box . But it can become even more so with the new customization methods available, particularly Silverlight, it will be very easy to create a SP site layout and design that is specifically oriented towards touch control. I’m sure we’ll see examples light up everywhere using this. Here’s a guy who already did something like this: a Bing maps touch control in a SP 2010 server solution: link. Nothing will hold you back in doing something similar in Office 365′s SPO.

Office Web Apps
For accessing Office documents from, for example, a Document library we have the option to use Office Web Apps. These will be available by default in the O365 for Enterprise E1 subscription to view only. If you also want to edit using Office Web Apps you’ll need the additional O365 E2 subscription.

So let’s go ahead and open some Office docs on an iPad for viewing:

A Word Document:

An Excel sheet:

A PowerPoint presentation:

Notice that every document maintains the rich contents; pictures, tables, text formatting, graphs, etc. Very impressive. Also, it feels pretty good on an iPad, there’s no ‘swiping’ to the next page or any other gesture controls, but I felt comfortable using the standard button controls.

Editing documents…here’s a catch. On an iPad, editing only works in Excel. Not in Word, PPT or OneNote. This is actually a limitation in the iPad/Safari software; it simply does not recognize the ‘typing areas’ in Word, PPT and OneNote as text entering areas. So when you select the canvas in Word to start typing…Safari does not recognize it as a text entering area and will not give you the option to use the keyboard.

From sources…I hear that MS and Apple are aware of this and working on fixing this. I’m pretty sure this limitation will go away since Apple’s mobile stuff is showing up everywhere, including corporations.

But for now…all I can show you is editing an Excel file in Excel Web App on an iPad:

Pretty cool right, I even like the fact the sentence above contains the words Excel, Web, App, editing and iPad…not something many of us saw coming 5 years ago

Concluding

On an iPad:

• SharePoint all OOTB functionality: CHECK
• Office Web Apps viewing: CHECK
• Excel Web App editing: CHECK
• Word, PPT and OneNote editing: nope

Tags: Office 365 Grid

This entry was posted on April 12, 2011 at 10:21 am and is filed under Office 365 Grid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.